卦Trigram 2.0
Asian Snowcrash

Even though I can, obviously, get access to this blog from China, it’s been slooooooooow - at times, it can take up to ten minutes for a page to load. This discourages me from blogging - and if I notice typos after I’ve posted, it’s a real pain to try and fix them.

Happily, this is now much improved - I’ve finally discovered and installed Tor , which is giving me much faster access (plus, of course, letting me see lots of web sites that are normally not visible from China - a list which has expanded a lot over the last week…)

Interesting to see a lot of traffic recently coming from a post on Yahoo’s finance boards; this is to my post discussing the CECT T100 - the phone with biometric security. It seems I’m not the only one interested in what’s going on with Chinese phone design.

From that Yahoo! thread, I see that the T100 is available for CNY1380, or SGD270 - which is a pretty good price. Some Beijing-based friends are coming to Singapore soon; perhaps I should ask them to bring me one…

Apparently the T100 is being very well-received within China; at least, so say China Economic Review.

The development of biometric security for phones very much seems to be driven by Asian demand. A quick review finds that:

• LG are introducing fingerprint-access phones for the Korean market.
• Hitachi bringing out a model in Japan.

Singapore, of course, is home to the most notorious example of the dangers of losing your phone. My own phone didn’t have anything controversial on it in the least, but as our phones increasingly become our gateway to our online selves, our address-book of first resort, our digital recorders of our everyday curiosity…. the need for better security is clear. This is a trend to watch.